The Angriest Guy in All of Cyberland

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The Angriest Guy in All of Cyberland

There's got to be some mistake. It's after midnight, and I'm hanging with Brock Meeks, by all appearances one of the angriest guys in all of cyberland, at least in ASCII. But in person, he doesn't seem angry at all. He's downright calm. The trim 39-year-old is sitting at the computer, getting ready to write the latest installment of his irregular CyberWire Dispatch, an acerbic online news service he distributes for free. Since his work is broadly available over the Net, his potential readership is greater than that of most daily newspapers.

You might expect him to eat gunpowder and Tabasco as he writes. Instead, he's sipping a cup of coffee, in bare feet, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. (By day, he's the Washington bureau correspondent for Inter@ctive Week.) It's just that he has learned to focus his anger: he saves it for the right time - and the right enemies.

But Meeks is not just a Walter Mitty with a modem. His 1989 reporting from the Russian war in Afghanistan for the San Francisco Chronicle earned him the top award for global journalism from the World Affairs Council.

Dave Wilson, who covers computers and technology for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has high praise for Meeks's work: "He's a real bird dog, and he's got a good nose." But, Wilson continues, "he sort of reminds me of the old-fashioned pamphleteer - he's got a real solid ideology, he feels he knows the answer, and he's going to force-feed it to you."

Of course, there are risks in going your own way, and Meeks knows them better than he'd like to. Last year, he wrote a typically nasty article, "Cybersucker," about an Internet-distributed sales pitch he found suspicious. The pitch? Agree to receive electronic junk mail from an outfit called "Electronic Postal Service" and collect US$500 or more a year.

Meeks responded to the ad and received another ad - this time for a $159 book-and-software package that promised to earn him as much as a million dollars each year. Meeks called the outfit promoting the offer "nothing more than a shell company for a direct-mail scam."

The head of the company, Benjamin Suarez, sued Meeks for defamation. Meeks became something of a poster boy for freedom of the online press: a legal-defense fund was formed, and eventually Suarez folded his tent and walked away from the suit, asking Brock for no more than his $64 in court costs and a clarification.

Meeks hammers out the dispatches on his no-name PC clone, using a tiny text editor called Qedit. Though his online readers get the columns for free, some print periodicals that run his dispatches pay for the privilege - boosting his earnings by some $12,000 a year.